Option to limit comments to 1 per user per day

Metafilter allows users to start one discussion per day, which works really well as a quality control filter.

+1

Cool idea. I also like something along the lines of "no more comments until X number of other people have commented" - to prevent the conversation from becoming dominated by two or three people.

@alanna Loomio already appears to track the number of users in a discussion. Is this the case?

If so, perhaps a delay between posts pased on a logarithmic scale of the number of users in a discussion. A hard coded time limit could curtail discussions. There may even be some public research on the topic.

There's not a lot that would turn me off to a tool more than 'Oh, you can't participate in this right now. Wait for another 3 - 16 hours'. I see that message and I either leave, or do something hacky like edit a previous comment to include my new point or create (or maintain) some other account in order to post again. Yeah we can regulate these things as well but it's just putting fingers in the dam, as it were; if someone wants to put an(other) opinion out there, they will (and should be able to.)

We used to call these 'banana peel features', which are basically features which prevent the user from doing something, rather than allowing them to do something, and I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that you're better off providing functionality to your users with your efforts, rather than limiting them (this is strictly feature development; I'm excepting things like security and bot handling in this.)

I guess my larger overall point is that getting people to shut up on the internet is a bit of a losing battle, and that encouraging more meaningful discourse through education and example is a more sustainable and scalable way to improve discussion quality, rather than placing an onus on the code itself to regulate discussion quality. (Which it really has no understanding of. Who's to say a conversation between 2 or 3 people in rapid succession isn't a constructive and iterative discussion, 100% of the time?)

Sorry to have -2 cents!

Fun - I think giving digital facilitators tools to craft the spaces they want is exactly where loomio needs to go.

The trick to this sort of feature is to build something quite generic so that facilitators can use them creatively in ways that surprise you.

Whatever it is it should be easy and intuitive for a facilitator to turn on and visible so participants don't get annoyed or surprised about loomio behaving differently.

Something along the lines of Conversation Rules or Loomio Games might do the trick or making it so you're leaning on Loomio Plugins for this sort of customisation - just like Trello has power ups.

I think giving digital facilitators tools to craft the spaces they want is exactly where loomio needs to go.

so much +1.

the node.js core community recently had a discussion on a code of conduct that might have benefited from comment limits. i find the discussion (although very long and maybe somewhat confusing without context of the node.js community) is a good organic example of a community discussion on an important issue that would benefit from better facilitation tools (the only facilitation tools available in GitHub are the abilities to delete comments or lock conversations).

Of course, Loomio has the ability to help a community make a decision so moderating a Loomio user could actually be done through a community decision made using Loomio itself.

I agree that as the discussions get longer, people cannot read everything anymore. But this solution is totally wrong. It cannot be a solution to limit usage but to facilitate reading!

People should be able to filter discussion posts based on a comment type, favorite users. More complex but interesting would be to create discussion objects or use tags and link comments to them.

Ex. this discussion has some concerns, some ideas, some references to other discussions, some participants, some timestamps. If we would be able to turn all these objects in tags or graphical objects and link comments to them it would be much easier to read, filter, navigate, measure and summarize.

A tool for visualising the flow & branching of a discussion may be useful to map entry points for participants. Perhaps with hashtags creating the nodes?

Something like Andy & co at Twingl are creating with Trailblazer etc.

http://twin.gl/

#offtopic
@jgrey huh, that's funny I'm the frontend dev for Trailblazer :). There was a decision-making tool that already does exactly that, though I can't remember its name.

Outside of trailblazer, you may be interested in the similar work I'm doing for OpenAppJS. In particular see this update. Currently I'm working on 'View a Group as a Network', then "View a group as holons (circles within circles)". Much of the same code could be used for "View a Discussion as a Network" and the intention is to have this eventually pull from Loomio (and other OpenApp Ecosystem) API's.

#offtopic followup.

@alanna I did notice this one sided posting in the Future Funding topic and noticed the friendly suggestion to post less and read other peoples views more.

Groups could outline discussion Etiquette or a polite flag could be raised automatically after a number of posts.

Attachments or tags could be used to go beyond a certain word count limit

Edit the attachment :

What would help to improve about this issue is to add labels
- a sticker as marker for good comments one might refer to it later (not only "like")
- as marker for "new edited" for both comment and discussion

- enhance editor to encourage members to edit the discussion by coloring new or edited text (etherpad)
- when discussion is newly edited send out email to the members.

@zack
Do you mean like a tag cloud? I guess it would also be possible to display how many posts/comments a particular member had made within a particular topic/group etc.

Short, salient comments, perhaps one key point per paragraph as in the post above help to keep things flowing and on topic.